Ideuhs are incipient thoughts

December 04, 2010

Sato Kashiwa's "Search Engine of Memory"

Ever since I picked up Sato Kashiwa's book Creative Thinking in a Japanese bookstore last summer, I've been fascinated by how effortlessly he seems to come up with amazing ideas for his clients. If you check out his portfolio site, you'll be amazed at the variety of his work, but what's just as amazing, the more I read about him, is the disciplined and, for lack of a better word, almost logical way he seems to arrive at breakthrough work.

I've summarized the first five of Sato's suggestions around the power of questions and visualization in getting to the root of the problems you're trying to solve, and more effectively communicating your ideas. Since then I've had my own creative challenges, and have put these principles to work, with good effect. For example, I recently won a project for Intel, after the client mentioned she liked the way I questioned her. But it's the sixth technique that I now find most fascinating, and the one that I have yet to put into practice. I'm hoping that writing about it will make it happen, because the one thing I've discovered about blogging is that it's a great way to get ideas to stick in my own head.

When you need to communicate your ideas - either visually or verbally - Sato writes, you can't have too many means of expression at your disposal. With a rich supply of expression, you can convey fresher and more accurate images to your client. And the storehouse of expression, Sato says, is memory. In other words, full self-expression can be helped by greater development and control of your memory, the ability to call up accurate expressions from memory at will.

Sato's solution is to make a habit of tagging the things you experience. Tagging is putting a label on the things that catch your attention, and consciously filing those associations in memory. Just like tagging blogs and web pages raises their search rankings, Sato's idea is that tagging perceptions increases your chances of calling them from memory later. It transforms memory into a search engine.

A good example is Sato's package design for Japanese cosmetics brand Lissage. While a premium brand in Japan, one of Lissage's issues was that it wasn't as well known as it should have been for its advanced skincare technologies. When examining the pump bottle for Lissage's Skin Maintenizer serum, he had the idea of introducing a trigger mechanism. Triggers require less force than pumps, but because they have a functional appearance reminiscent of household cleansing products, they weren't used in cosmetics. Nevertheless, Sato was intrigued by the possibilities of creating an elegant trigger package that would convey functionality and beauty at the same time. Where did he get this idea?

Some time before, Sato had been shopping for a suit in Paris when he noticed a chrome-plated fire extinguisher in the store. He was impressed by how the plating completely transformed a functional object into a thing of beauty and elegance. So he consciously made a mental tag, associating "fire extinguisher" and "chrome." When he started working on Lissage, he was able to call up this memory to produce a true product innovation: the cosmetics industry's first trigger bottle.

Developing the Habit of Tagging

So how do we get into the habit of making mental tags? Sato says that in his role as a designer, his job is to "create new value that hasn't been before," and so he has gotten into the habit of looking at things from different angles. The two most basic ways that he looks at things are from the perspective of the everyday person and that of a creator.

The "everyday" perspective is a generally neutral point of view. If you're in any kind of marketing- or communications-related work, it actually requires a bit of effort to consciously adopt this point of view (that is, when you're not in your natural everyday mode) because you need rid yourself of the preconceptions that come with wanting to communicate something.

Sato's idea of the "creative" perspective is one that tries to look objectively at one's own "everyday" persona. There are actually two creative perspectives. One is the "macro" view that looks at people's activities in terms of history and trends. The other is the "micro" view that zooms in on more personal and psychological motivations.

Some things I've discovered about my everyday mode are that I'm very easily swayed by fast-food advertising, whereas I'm not as concerned about water and energy conservation as my wife says I should be. So I guess you could call this the Homer Simpson point of view. If I look at fast food from a "creative" perspective, I might find that on the macro level, advertising for burgers is ubiquitous and well-photographed, and on the micro level, I have some prehistoric craving for carbs, salt, and fat. The point is, if you try to look at whatever happens to grab your attention from several different angles, you should be able to assign several tags to it.

Sato says he first got into the habit of tagging when he was studying to get into art school. Japanese art school entrance exams had an image association section, in which applicants have to come up with images for abstract concepts, like "sweet" or "drunk." As a high-school student without a stock of visual themes in his mind, Sato found this exercise extremely difficult. His test-prep teacher told the class that everyday life is full of idea sources, and that his students just had to adopt the creative perspective to find them. At first, Sato couldn't relate to this concept, but after daily practice, he found it became second nature.

The only training, Sato writes, is to actively assign tags to the things that strike your eye. Making this effort will gradually build up a storehouse of images in your brain that you can automatically draw upon when needed. Ask yourself, "Why do I like this?" or "Why don't I like this?" and make the words you come up with your tags. Sato finds that it's much easier to identify why you like something than why you don't like it - and that tagging things you don't like is not only great training, but also opens up the possibility of seeing ways in which you might find a way to like what you dislike.